Directed Games

Jogos Dirigidos creates a language experience. In the Várzea Queimada community, located in the Sertão of Piauí, the backcountry of the northeastern Brazilian state, a place with about 900 inhabitants and a high rate of deaf-mute population, access to water and public investment is scarce, as is the learning of Libras, the official Brazilian sign language. In the face of all these limitations, Várzea Queimada’s deaf community created their own language. The film features body and speech exercises and an improvised outdoor stage for spontaneous testimonials from a group of 18 local characters, men and women. Most of the statements, many of them untranslated, are revised phrase by phrase, linking gestures to words and systematizing Várzea Queimada’s gestural lexicon as if we were facing an educational video that teaches a new language, beyond its universe and its own questions. (Berlinale)